Annotated Contents to

Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming

By Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. and Howard Rheingold

Chapter 1: The World of Lucid Dreaming

Reviews reasons for learning to become lucid in your dreams.
The uses of consciousness. Lucid dreaming and the potential for
promoting personal growth and self-development, enhancing self-
confidence, improving mental and physical health, facilitating
creative problem-solving, and helping you to progress on the
path to self-mastery.

Chapter 2: Preparation for Learning Lucid Dreaming

Provides necessary background on sleep and helps you overcome any
reservations you might have about lucid dreaming that might inhibit your
progress. Next, it helps you get acquainted with your dreams. You will
learn how to begin a dream journal, and how to increase your dream recall.
You will need to recall at least one dream per night before attempting
lucid dream induction techniques. When you have a dream journal with
several entries, you will be ready to build a catalog of dreamsigns.
These are the characteristic features of dreams that you can use as
signposts to lucidity.

Chapter 3: Waking Up in the Dream

Discusses techniques for realizing
you are dreaming from within the dream. The two major techniques
presented are the Reflection-Intention technique, which is based on the
practice of questioning whether you are awake or dreaming, and MILD, the
technique I used to learn to have lucid dreams at will, which trains you
to remember to notice when you are dreaming.

Chapter 4: Falling Asleep Consciously

Describes techniques for entering the dream state lucidly directly
from the waking state.

Chapter 5: The Building of Dreams

Provides a solid background on the origins and nature of the dreaming
process, and discusses lucid dreaming in the context of dreams in general.

Shows you how to
gain control over the dream: how to remain in a lucid dream, how to
awaken when you wish, and how to manipulate and observe the dream world.
In addition to explaining methods of exercising power over the dream, we
discuss the benefits inherent in taking an open, flexible, and non-
commanding role in lucid dreams.

Chapter 7: Adventures and Explorations

Shows how you can use lucid
dreaming for wish-fulfillment and the satisfaction of your desires.
Examples and suggestions are provided to help you explore new worlds or
enact exciting adventures in your dreams, and show how you can tie your
dream adventures into your personal self-development.

Chapter 8: Rehearsal for Living

Explains how lucid dreaming can be a
practical tool for practicing for your waking life. Lucid dreaming can
be used as a "flight simulator" for life, a way in which you can
practice new ways of living, as well as particular skills. Practice in
the dream state can contribute to enhanced experience, improved
performance, and deepened understanding in waking life.

Chapter 9: Creative Problem Solving

Discusses lucid dreaming as a
fruitful source of creativity, for art, science, business, or personal
life. Diverse examples are given, such as the use of lucid dreaming to
find a name for a soon-to-be-born child, to repair cars, or to
understand abstract mathematical concepts.

Helps you use lucid dreaming to face
and overcome fears and inhibitions that may be preventing you from
getting the most out of your life. Lucid dreamers can overcome
nightmares, and in so doing learn how to make the best of the worst
situations imaginable.

Chapter 11: The Healing Dream

Shows how lucid dreamers can achieve
more integrated, healthier personalities. Lucid dreams can also help
those who have unresolved conflicts from past or present relationships,
or with deceased friends or family members. And, in lucid dreams, we can
learn mental flexibility. Because nothing can harm us in the dream, we
can do anything, and try to solve our problems in unusual or unheard of
ways. This helps us to increase our repertoire of possible behaviors in
the waking world, thereby decreasing the probability of getting stuck in
situations with which we don't know how to cope.

Chapter 12: Life is a Dream: Intimations of a Wider World

Takes a step
beyond the application of lucid dreaming to your everyday life, and
shows how lucid dreams can be used to attain a more complete
understanding of yourself and your relation to the world. In the dream
you are only who you "dream yourself to be," and understanding this can
help you see to what extent your waking self is limited by your own
conceptions of who you are. Examples of transcendental experiences that
happened in lucid dreams will show you a direction that you might wish
to explore in your own inner worlds.

Afterword: The Adventure Continues...

Invites you to join the Lucidity
Institute, a membership society devoted to advancing knowledge on the
nature and potentials of lucid dreaming.